On July 10, 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech in Chicago as part of the extended Fourth of July celebrations common to that era. He addressed the question of American identity at a time when the nation was grappling with both slavery and unprecedented immigration.  In his speech, Lincoln transformed American nationality from a matter of national ancestry into a matter of creed—that adherence to the principles of the Declaration created a bond more powerful than bloodlines. He reimagined America as a nation bound by shared commitment to universal human equality.

Lincoln spoke in a city that had elected a Know-Nothing mayor just three years earlier and where xenophobic sentiment against Catholic immigrants ran high. Over the past 25 years, a surge of non-English immigration occurred, raising the percentage of all persons born outside the U.S. from about 2% to about 10%, with much of the migration geographically concentrated.

Between 1831 and 1840, immigration more than quadrupled to a total of 599,000, including about 207,000 Irish and about 152,000 Germans. Between 1845 and 1855 alone, 1.5 million people fled Ireland for the U.S. in the wake of the potato famine. In 1845 – 1855, more than a million Germans came to the United States.  By 1850, around 90% of the population was native-born, down from 98% in 1830. These immigrants settled in concentrated patterns across the nation: the Irish congregated in northeastern cities where they landed, particularly Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Germans, often arriving with more resources and in family groups, spread across the Midwest to cities like Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, and established farms in the Upper Ohio and Mississippi River valleys U.S.

Lincoln offered a revolutionary argument that effectively elevated these recent German and Irish Catholic arrivals to equal status with the English-origin population at the founding of the Republic. He defined Americans not by ethno-nationalism but by sharing a democract creed. His words:

“If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”